The Canadian Center for Bioethical Reform has a way of bringing the abortion issue home: put pictures of aborted babies on the side of trucks accompanied with the word “choice,” and drive them throughout the town of Calgary.
Not everyone is happy with the display of these graphic, but truthful images. Celia Posyniak, executive director of a local abortion clinic said, “I just think in Canadian society, it’s really a rude, crude display. It shows a lack of manners.” If the display of abortion photos is crude, then how much cruder is the abortion itself? If it is a lack of manners to show pictures of what an abortion does, then how much less manners does one have who obtains and performs an abortion? I always find it interesting how pro-abortion advocates find pictures of what an abortion does so offensive, but do not find abortions offensive themselves. They object to showing pictures of what abortion does, but do not object to abortions themselves. Why? Most object to showing the pictures because they don’t want the public to see what abortion really looks like. They don’t want the public to see how developmentally advanced aborted babies really are. They know that when people see the horror of abortion, public support for abortion will fade. I agree. That’s why the public needs to see these graphic images.
Thinking to Believe 
August 17, 2007 at 9:21 am
Is it crude? Certainly. I’m sure we can think of other things that are done privately – necessary things that are not immoral to engage in – that it would be crude to display on billboards.
Still, I doubt “crudeness” is the real concern.
Could it be that the real concern is that the ads are misleading? That they show something that appears to be a baby, with the thoughts and feelings of a baby, when in fact it’s something else entirely? I believe that’s the general view of the pro-choice community, that they look like babies but they have no thoughts, pain sensation, or souls.
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August 17, 2007 at 9:37 am
Arthur,
It’s true that most aborted babies are aborted prior to the development of thoughts and sensation, but what does that have to do with the issue? Can we cut up a comatose patient into pieces because he has no thoughts and cannot feel anything? Of course not. What if we did? What if I chose to show those pictures to the public to bring awareness to the issue (because I think it morally wrong to dismember comatose humans)? Would it be appropriate for people to say the pictures are misleading because they are not real humans? After all, those humans had no thoughts and could not feel pain. Do you think that explanation would fly? I don’t. People would recoil at the sight of what is being done to these humans, regardless of their ability to think or feel. So why should it fly for the unborn? What matters is that the person is a human being. And the unborn are human beings from the moment of conception. It is an incontrovertible biological fact.
The bottom line is that the pictures accurately show what abortion does. They do not mislead anyone. If people recoil at the pictures, maybe its because they awaken their moral senses to something they have been desensitized to because abortion has been sanitized by nice euphemisms like “choice” and “reproductive rights.”
As for saying they don’t have souls, that’s philosophically impossible. Anything that is living has a soul. The unborn are living, hence they have a soul. See my article titled “Clones Have Souls” at http://www.apostolic.net/biblicalstudies/clonesouls.htm for more information.
Jason
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August 17, 2007 at 4:49 pm
Amen Jason!
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August 18, 2007 at 9:07 am
Jason,
You wrote: As for saying they don’t have souls, that’s philosophically impossible. Anything that is living has a soul. The unborn are living, hence they have a soul. See my article titled “Clones Have Souls”
So you believe that an egg, because it is alive, has a soul? And a sperm has a soul? Amoebas have souls?
As to it being philosophically impossible for ensoulment to occur post-conception: “In Christian theology, ensoulment refers to the creation of a soul within, or the placing of a soul into, a human being—a concept most often discussed in reference to abortion…. In the early thirteenth century, [Pope] Innocent III stated that the soul enters the body of the fetus at the time of quickening when the mother first felt movement of the fetus.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ensoulment
Arthur
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August 20, 2007 at 1:20 pm
Arthur,
Let me clarify to say I am referring to organisms.
As for when we are ensouled, all you have pointed out is that there has been disagreement over the issue even within the Christian tradition. The old pope’s views were based on an ignorance of biology and philosophy.
On a dualist perspective, the soul grounds and moves the development of a living organism. Again, read my article. I would also suggest you read Body & Soul by J.P. Moreland and Scott B. Rae.
Jason
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August 20, 2007 at 2:20 pm
I read the article, but it doesn’t answer the question. It says that eggs and sperm have soul potentiality, but that all living things have souls. Given that eggs and sperm are alive, that appears to be a contradiction. Does an egg or a sperm, by itself, have a soul? If not, why not?
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August 30, 2007 at 5:02 pm
Arthur,
I’m not ignoring you. I will respond. I’ve just been real busy and haven’t done anything with the blog that I couldn’t do in less than 2 minutes. My response to you requires more than 2 minutes. 🙂
Jason
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September 5, 2007 at 3:15 pm
Arthur,
The issue is not about being alive per se. Being alive is necessary property of souls, but not a sufficient property. Souls belong to organisms, not cells—to the whole, not the part. Do you dispute that? If not, and if the unborn are whole, living, human organisms from the moment of conception, then it follows that they have a soul from the moment of conception.
Since we are both Christians here, the Biblical data is relevant to the discussion. Where in Scripture do you find any justification for thinking the soul of man comes to exist at some point in time after the body comes to exist? I know of none. In fact, I think Scripture implies that the unborn are ensouled from the moment they come into existence
The only example in which we find someone being ensouled is Adam at creation, but the exceptional nature of that example makes it a poor test case. What I think we can glean from this episode, however, is that the soul is what brings life to the body. Prior to God ensouling Adam, He was just a “new” corpse; a lifeless body. But once God gave Him a soul He came to life. If the soul is what provides life to the body, and the unborn are living organisms from conception, then it follows that the unborn are ensouled from conception on.
Another Biblical argument for ensoulment-at-conception is found in the way God speaks of the unborn: as human persons without regard to their gestational age. We know human persons have a soul. It would seem to me, then, that in the absence of any gestational qualifiers indicated in the text, the default conclusion would be that the Bible implies the unborn have a soul from the time they come to be.
Even from a common-sense perspective it stands to reason that humans are ensouled at conception. We know humans have souls, and we know the unborn are human from the moment of conception, so why think a human at the zygote stage of development does not have a soul? The burden of proof is on anyone who would deny that the zygote has a soul.
From a biological perspective, DNA appears to need a driver. DNA molecules are inert in themselves. It makes sense to see the driver as the soul. The soul is ontologically and causally prior to the body. As Moreland and Rae wrote, “[T]he soul is an individuated essence that makes the body a human body and that diffuses, informs, animates, develops, unifies and grounds the biological functions of the body. The various chemical processes and parts (e.g., DNA) involved in morphogenesis are tools, means or instrumental causes employed by the soul as it teleologically unfolds its capacities toward the formation of a mature human body that functions as it ought to function by nature. … “The body develops and matures as a teleological development in which the soul’s internal structure for a body is progressively realized in a lawlike way, grounded in the human essence in the soul, toward the end of realizing a mature, human body.” (Body & Soul, 202, 206)
Jason
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September 11, 2007 at 4:50 pm
Jason,
You write: The issue is not about being alive per se. Being alive is necessary property of souls, but not a sufficient property. Souls belong to organisms, not cells—to the whole, not the part. Do you dispute that?
I don’t believe that all living organisms have souls. Regardless, I don’t see your justification for saying that life itself is insufficient. There are one-cell organisms like amoebas, and it would seem strange that amoeba would have souls but not other cells. Most Christians I’ve met believe that cats and dogs don’t have souls and don’t go to heaven, so to go as far as amoebas is definitely non-standard. So I’m interested in hearing the justification for all organisms but not parts of organisms.
As Wikipedia notes, “The soul, according to many religious and philosophical traditions, is the self-aware essence unique to a particular living being.” If we extend “souls” to amoebas, it’s hard to understand what is even meant by “soul.”
You write: Since we are both Christians here, the Biblical data is relevant to the discussion. Where in Scripture do you find any justification for thinking the soul of man comes to exist at some point in time after the body comes to exist? I know of none.
Scripture is relevant, but not the only source. Limiting to Scripture, it is unclear. Some verses speak of souls before conception, for example. There are verses that suggest that abortion is in no way comparable to murder, which suggests that the unborn do not have souls. Consider Exodus 21:22-25:
“If men struggle with each other and strike a woman with child so that she miscarries, yet there is no injury to the mother, he shall surely be fined as the woman’s husband may demand of him, and he shall pay as the judges decide. But if there is any further injury, then you shall appoint as a penalty life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise.”
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September 24, 2007 at 11:14 am
Do you not agree that a person is essentially their soul (rather than their body; i.e. our personal identity is bound up in our immaterial man, not our material man)? If so, then there can only be one soul per body.
If a person is essentially a soul, then the soul must belong to the organism, not the individual cells. If each cell had a soul, then “each” of us would be billions of persons. We know we are not billions of persons, therefore each of our cells does not contain a soul. Besides, it would be a category mistake to reduce the soul (a non-material entity) down to the biological level (a material entity).
Regarding amoebas, they are an organism that is made up of just one cell. Not so for other animals. It’s the difference between a whole and parts. In our case, one cell is just a part of the total organism. In the case of an amoeba, one cell is the whole organism.
You seem to be thinking of souls as meaning one has moral and eternal value. Not true. A soul is the animating principle in living things. The Bible seems clear that animals have souls (Gen 1:30; Rev 8:9, the word “life” in both Hebrew and Greek is the same word used to refer to the human soul) and spirits (Eccl 3:21), but they are qualitatively different from our own: ours is made in the image of God, their’s is not. Our soul will live eternally, their soul will not.
We can only tell what kind of soul an animal has by looking at their behavior and reasoning backwards as to what faculties of the soul would be necessary to account for such behavior. Take dogs. They experience sensations, desires, willings (but not libertarian freedom), and thought, but they lack moral awareness (they cannot distinguish between what they desire most and what is intrinsically most desirable), abstract thought, the concept of truth, the concept of universals (they only understand statistics based on experience), and language (they understand signs, not symbols). Neither do they appear to be able to have desires to have desires, beliefs about their beliefs, etc. (they cannot transcend their own mental states to engage in self-reflection and introspection). While they have souls, they are not of the same quality as human souls.
What verses speak of souls prior to conception?
I would take exception with your interpretation of Exodus 21:22-25. There are four problems with it:
1. It’s not talking about a miscarriage. The normal Hebrew word for miscarriage is shakal. Here Moses used yasa’, a term used in connection with live birth. It’s talking about a fetus born prematurely as a result of the violence.
2. It does not compare to abortion because abortion is intentional, while this was accidental.
3. Even if your interpretation were correct, there was still a penalty, so we can’t say the unborn was considered of no moral value. At best we could say it was not as valuable.
4. Even if your interpretation were correct, the penalty does not indicate a lesser value for the fetus because the Law did not normally require capital punishment for an accidental death (Ex. 21:13-14, 20-21; Numb. 35:10-34; Deut. 19:1-13)
5. Even if your interpretation were correct, it would not mean the unborn do not have souls. Exodus 21:20-21 says a person who accidentally kills his slave has no penalty. Not true of the non-slave. Does this mean the slave has no soul, or does not have as good of a soul as a non-slave? Of course not!
The text means that if a woman is accidentally struck and gives birth prematurely but sustains no harm to either her or the baby only a fine is due. If injury is sustained, lex talionis applies. If the baby ends up dying, the perpetrator must be executed.
Jason
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